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Television Simulator

Using the Launcher

Using the new Television Simulator Launcher is the easiest way to install, update and manage TVS on Windows and Linux. It runs in the system tray and includes an integrated web server that serves TVS without the need for anything else. In addition, the launcher will manage your configurations and keep your user data separate when updating to a new release.

Installation

Section titled “Installation”

TVS Launcher is available currently for Windows and Linux. Download the latest version for your platform from the GitHub releases page.

Windows

Section titled “Windows”

TVS Launcher running on Windows 11

  1. Put tvs-launcher.exe in a folder where you want to run the launcher from.

  2. When you run it for the first time, it will create the necessary folders and be ready to use.

Linux

Section titled “Linux”

TVS Launcher running on Raspberry Pi OS

  1. Install the package appropriate for your distribution. For example, installing on Raspberry Pi OS would use the .deb package for arm64.

  2. Once installed, you can run it from your application menu (under Audio / Video) or by running tvs-launcher from the terminal.

Usage

Section titled “Usage”

First run

Section titled “First run”

  1. Click the tray icon to open the launcher. When you first run it, no releases will be installed yet.

  2. Click the Update button at the top to download and install the latest version of TVS.

    Tray icon menu showing the "Update" command

    Once updated, the server will start automatically, by default at http://localhost:3990

    You can change the server port and host in the settings.json file located in the root folder.

Configuration Management

Section titled “Configuration Management”

Tray icon menu showing how everything looks after first install

All of your user data and configurations are stored in the configurations folder. When updating to a new version, your existing data will be preserved. New configurations and installations will start with the latest demo config file.

Choose “Open current configuration folder” to open the folder where your current configuration is stored and edit your config.tvs.yml file, and the changes should be reflected when you refresh TVS in your browser.

Using the CLI

Section titled “Using the CLI”

The launcher also includes a command-line interface (CLI) that you can use to control it from a terminal or script. This is also useful for running the launcher on Linux servers without a graphical interface.

Run tvs-launcher --help to see the available commands: